Dumbing-down in the West

Interesting article about the decline of education in the USA:



www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201407/anti-intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-america


Nations with a strongly democratic history, like the USA and the Netherlands, are especially vulnerable to the misunderstanding of the democratic principle, which is nowadays increasingly misused to defend undefensible positions, with devastating results on the levels of politics and culture.

Quote from the article:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

One of the more thoughtful comments:

Let's not forget one of the major strains of anti-scientism and anti-rationalism in American life - namely, left-wing post-modernist 'thought'. After all, fundamentalist Christians do not deny that there are truths that we can know. The 'there is no truth', 'everything is subjectivity' brigade has done unimaginable harm to intellectual life in the West, as was their intent. People like Freud and the members of the Frankfurt School admitted to trying to undermine Western culture. They have been so successful that cultural marxism infests our universities, in which social science has been reduced to 'lived experience' narratives of post-colonialist post-marxist experience.

This comment also applies to Europe and especially, the Netherlands, where any marxist suspicion is used to battle hierarchic notions like knowledge and culture, and where reality is not the result of observation, analysis and argument, but of general consensus including the lowest determiner.

The only means to battle this decline is the reviving of the vestiges of knowledge and principles of culture and intelligence as slowly and laboriously developed over the ages. In the context of erosion, a traditionalist position is not 'conservative', as leftwing degenerates would have it, but common sense. There are things worth of preserving and further developing, especially with an eye on the threats the West has to deal with on all levels.